Authors of The Criminal Justice Club and Toasts

The Criminal Justice Club is the book about Walt Lewis' conversion from a young ACLU liberal, who sympathized with the criminal, into an advocate for crime victims and longer sentences for violent and career criminals.

Lewis defines The Criminal Justice Club as a group of deputy district attorneys, public defenders, private defense attorneys, criminal court judges, and the career criminal who have been through the system many times.

The Wave. Water waves. Not lazy surf lapping at your toes along the beach. Colossal, ship-swallowing rogue waves; scientists scrambling to understand the phenomenon; and extreme surfers seeking the ultimate challenge. Susan Casey’s account follows the exploits of boarders conquering suicidally large, 70- and 80-foot waves and the physicists trying to grapple with the destructive powers of 1,740-foot waves off the coast of Alaska and tsunamis in the Pacific. Casey is our guest.

Today we’ll talk to two veterans of the Iraq war. Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. His book, The Long Walk, chronicles his "story of war and the life that follows."

When veteran Kevin Powers returned from Iraq, he turned his experiences there into The Yellow Birds, a novel about two young privates trying to stay alive at war. Castner and Powers join us for the full hour.